Headlines

Barack Obama’s persuasion army

These field operations were the reason the nation’s 44th president had to do 153 fundraisers this year. This wasn’t just a presidency. It was a political corporation producing political product. …

For the Obama campaign, the future was irrelevant. What mattered was the “product” of the president’s first term. It’s clear why Barack Obama was willing to turn former Wall Street Democrats and contributors like J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon into furious critics of the president with his seemingly compulsive scapegoating of bankers, millionaires and “the wealthiest.” Or why at the last minute of the 2011 deficit negotiations he demanded a tax increase that wrecked any possible deal and would have blown up the GOP. Once past ObamaCare, the president spent his first term creating these wedge issues and wedge people for his re-election.

Simultaneously, his field operations were driving these wedges into the heads of the Obama base of minorities, single women and campus voters. Using national politics in this way is known as agitprop. …

Some Republicans are consumed with how to make more people like them. Interesting but complicated. The Obama Democrats used the most sophisticated information techniques to drive an uncomplicated strategy with two words: antipathy and fear. What minimal positive content existed in the Obama campaign was frosting on the stones.

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I wish I could share your optimism that this is some kind of Pyrrhic victory for Soetero. We’re the ones who wish he never won. He’ll never have a day when he wishes he never won. At this point, he might be thinking he’s king for life.

The 0bama campaign had five plus years to work on exactly how to target voters against Mitt Romney, because anybody but the truly blind could see Romney spending 2008 onwards consolidating all the endorsements, etc he would need to get the nomination in 2012. I think it is less the supposed brilliance of the 0bama campaign than this. You think all this class warfare of the past four years was an accident?

The solution here is to let 2015-2016 play out as the primary voters want it to happen. Let the Clinton/whoever machine have only 18 months to target their likeliest 2016 opponent, not five years.

The 0bama campaign had five plus years to work on exactly how to target voters against Mitt Romney, because anybody but the truly blind could see Romney spending 2008 onwards consolidating all the endorsements, etc he would need to get the nomination in 2012. I think it is less the supposed brilliance of the 0bama campaign than this. You think all this class warfare of the past four years was an accident?

The solution here is to let 2015-2016 play out as the primary voters want it to happen. Let the Clinton/whoever machine have only 18 months to target their likeliest 2016 opponent, not five years.

Sekhmet on November 15, 2012 at 9:54 AM

Actually, Axelrod thought Romney was going to be the GOP nominee in 2008. They had all this oppo research on him done then, millions of dollars worth. Then they thought Romney would be the VP pick after McCain won, and they were going to make him the de facto nominee because they knew they couldn’t demonize the war hero McCain. They really were shellshocked by the pick of Sarah Palin, and panicked because they had so little time to dig dirt on her and frame her to the voters.

Remember the brief kerfuffle about McCain’s seven houses? That was a weak stab at a class-warfare attack on McCain, but it fell flat.

I heard all this directly from someone who was working for the DNC at the time.

So you all think the GOP should get down in the mud to win? To what end? What about the big picture?

Obama WILL be sorry he won. He doesn’t like governing, he possesses no leadership abilities whatsoever, and face it, Sununu was right–he’s lazy.

He only likes campaigning. He simply HAD to win, but only to save his overinflated ego.

Perhaps Romney realized that winning dirty would make it near impossible to move the country in a better direction. Obama’s minions are as nasty as he is. They would have been out for “revenge.”

You see, Romney actually cares about America. Obama only cares about Obama.

Get ready for the next four years. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Meredith on November 15, 2012 at 10:17 AM

2016 is going to be really interesting. I have to think that the country is going to be exhausted and pissed, after what most will see as 16 years of bad leadership and ruinous partisanship. This could produce either the highest or lowest turnout in memory. It might give Hillary Clinton a big leg up because of the nostalgia for the Clinton years when the economy was good and people in Washington got stuff done. But it might also open the door to new and little-known candidates in both parties who promise something entirely different.

My big fear is that we have crossed a Rubicon where a majority of voters really just want to be entertained, are too dumb to understand policy and economics, and will be won only by the kind of scaremongering and pop-culture appeal that Obama used this year.

Maybe we really do need to pick Donald Trump in 2016. I’ve even heard suggestions that we should get Sean Hannity or Mark Levin to run.

I’ve decided I most likely will not vote again after seeing the fraud in this election. Philadelphia 59 precincts NOT ONE VOTE for Romney…19,500 votes ALL for Obama???? The Republican Sec State will not even consider an investigation. This is hopeless. I refuse to be a stooge and vote when I am already disenfranchised.

Interesting they targeted Asians, when elsewhere, all minority affirmative action seems to want to quash Asians who are successful. I am thinking first of quotas to keep them out of the best California public colleges, and also, changing the tests because Asians were doing “too well” for minorities, especially on standard math tests.